Residents living in Aprelevka's buildings have been battling for operational lifts for ten years.
Stories abound of buyers of new flats who get cheated, especially in the wake of high-profile scandals involving investors getting cheated out of housing investments they made. However, these stories pale in comparison to the never-ending nightmare going on in Aprelevka. The building at 34 Gorky Street is easily the most miserable place in the whole of the Moscow Region.
Construction began on this block of high-end flats toward the end of the previous century, and it lasted for a long time. But once the happy residents moved into their new palatial apartments they were faced with an unpleasant surprise. It turned out that during the many years of construction the builders managed to add an extra storey without proper authorization.
This paper has reported in the past on the woes of the people who were sold flats in spite of ongoing litigation and the government commission's refusal to certify the house as finished. The "happy" new residents spent years trying to obtain residence documents. During this time, they could not send their children to the local school, use the local hospital, vote in elections, and the list goes on. All the formalities were not settled until the start of the new millennium after the governor personally intervened.
But the worst was yet to come. For all these years the inhabitants of this illegal block of flats did not have any utilities: no gas, no hot water and no lifts.
"Once we were finally able to talk to Putin on a live video feed and tell him that we have to use portable gas tanks in our kitchens, we were plugged into the gas mains the following day," says one of the residents, Nikolai Vladimirov.
The block of flats was officially registered with house maintenance organizations in May 2005. The residents breathed a collective sigh of relief. But they were so caught up in the moment that they didn't notice that the lifts only worked for one day - the day when the government commission was inspecting the house. People didn't know if the lifts would be switched back on. As it happens, they weren't.
The ten-storey block of flats has about a thousand residents. Ever since they moved in (nobody can remember their exact move-in date, as a lot has happened since) the residents have had to walk up to the top floors. Elderly people, kids, and mothers with babies in arm all get their share of exercise every day. Disabled people, though, have to remain at home because climbing up and down the stairs is simply too much for them.
"Our complaints to the heads of the administrations of the Aprelevka and the Narofominsk municipal districts have gone unanswered," the authors of a letter to this newspaper explain. "Apparently they have more important things to do or they just don't give a damn about people's suffering. But we have hope. Putin helped us with the gas, so we'll write to Medvedev for help with the lifts."